autumn strangeness : teasel sprouts in seed heads

This year has been a bumper year for lots of things. Up and down the towpath, where widening work has scarred the edges of the newly smooth cycle track, thistles and teasels have grown in cheerful profusion in the disturbed earth. We have a pretty reasonable number of goldfinches in the area, but this year they were swamped; the plants too effusive and productive to lose all their seeds. You might have heard this year described as a mast year, here and there. Mast years, when the profusion of fruiting bodies (nuts, drupes, and famously acorns) overwhelms their usual predators. When the plants lay down the future generations. In extraordinary quantities.

Somewhere in all that profusion, things like this happen. Seeds get stuck in a seedhead, and in the long damp of  an English winter, they start to stir, reaching for a spring that is still a long way off, locked away on the other side of hard winter.

Teasel Seeds sprouting in their seed head during warm autumn weather.

There's a curiously unnatural aspect to this image. One of my friends likened a similar situation (with a poppy seed head) to spiders feeding on their mother's body. But there's more to this than just the visceral reaction of seeing the young feeding on their body of their parent. These seedlings are in a dead end. They won't survive the coming cold of January and February and they can't anchor themselves in a soil that is in some cases six or seven feet below them. 

 

 I don't know, do I maybe hear a tiny voice crying: rescue me?